The Constitution And Responsibility Of The Unfair Competitions By Reputation Evaluation Of Online Shopping

Reputation system of online shopping has been regarded as an importantplatform where buyers can share their purchase experience and sellers can advertisetheir reputations. Therefore, most buyers generally rely on former-buyers’ evaluationsabout the same kind of products to decide which seller they will choose. It is clear thatthe reputation system of C2C e-commerce website has played a vital role in onlineshopping, at the same time, has been an effective mechanism to regulate sellers’behaviors. With the rapid development of C2C online shopping, lots of problems thathave existed in the reputation system, such as acts of unfair competition likemalicious negative comments or false evaluation behaviors, have emerged. It’s veryconvenient and cost-effective way to use the reputation system to practice acts ofunfair competition but it will also cause serious consequences. This kind of act notonly damages competitors’ reputation rate so that they can hardly survive in theonline shopping platform, but also destroys the normal competition order of e-commerce. However, there is no specific provision against acts of unfair competitionin Anti-unfair Competition Law of the People’s Republic of China at present. In theauthor’s opinion, first, it should be identified that malicious negative comments andfalse evaluation behaviors are acts of unfair competition. Even though this is notclearly specified in the law, it should also be regulated as unfair competition inpractice. Second, it’s worth noticing that in the online shopping, new patterns ofcommercial slander and false advertising behaviors have appeared. The definitions ofboth behaviors in Anti-unfair Competition Law of the People’s Republic of China canno longer adapt to rapid development of e-commerce economy. In order to maintainthe ordinary competition order of C2C platform, it is crucially important to makestrict regulations about the legal responsibilities against malicious negative commentsor false evaluation behaviors. For this reason, the author has selected this problem asresearch object. Besides the Introduction and Summary, this thesis has four parts:The first part discusses the basic problems in the reputation system of onlineshopping. It mainly elaborates the rules and functions and the legal characters of thereputation system, and discusses the relationship between reputation system andunfair competition. This part also introduces “Professional Negative Commenter” and“Professional Delete-negative Worker”. The second part approaches the constitution of commercial slander behaviors inthe reputation system of e-commerce. It stated the definition and constitutiverequirements about commercial slander behaviors, discusses how the maliciousnegative comments constitute commercial slander behaviors and analyses theparticularity of malicious negative comments and their damages to consumers ofonline shopping.The third part analyses the constitution of false advertising behaviors inreputation system of online shopping. It has two parts. The first part introduces thebasic theories about false advertising behaviors from the aspects of concepts, formsand determination principles. Then it demonstrates that false credit comments canalso be regarded as false advertising behaviors and their damages to consumers.The fourth part investigates the legal responsibilities of using the online-shopping reputation system to practice unfair competition. It analyses that the mainbodies of this legal responsibility include sellers,“Professional NegativeCommenter” and “Professional Delete-negative Workers” and deals with the liabilityform of using the online-shopping reputation system to practice unfair competitionand the calculation method about compensation amount.In the summary, in addition to summarize the content of this thesis, the authoralso puts forward a further study about perfecting the supervision system onreputation system.